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Comment by ajscherer | Hacker News Reader

It seems like one of the least evil taxes to me. $3.5 million or more worth of assets are absolutely irrelevant to a corpse. So the great evil is that the descendants of someone who amassed a great fortune only get $1.5+ million that they did absolutely nothing to earn, after presumably having every conceivable advantage growing up? To me that seems much less evil than taking a fraction of what a living person actually worked to earn and might still need.

Of course, I usually reserve the word "evil" for killing, raping, arson, dragons, Satan and that kind of thing. Taxes seem to have a much less dramatic effect on their victims.

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This looks at the tax from the perspective of those who will inherit, and concludes that since spoiled kids don't deserve big inheritances, the estate tax is fair, just and moral. But what about where the money goes? Does the government deserve it? I don't think so. One might be able to make an argument that the money should go to society, because the system is what made the creation of wealth possible. But that's not what the estate tax does, the estate tax takes the money to the government. Arguing that spoiled kids have not earned it is a lot easier than arguing that the government is deserving.

What about looking at the tax from the perspective of the individual who created the wealth? What the tax does is encumber the creator of the wealth from deploying it as he/she sees fit. Why do we want to encumber creators of wealth?

TO CLARIFY: the gift taxes that are part of the estate tax complex encumber creators, not just corpses. If you remove the gift tax, I have no problem with the estate tax because nobody would ever pay it.

Why want to encumber an aristocracy, not creators of wealth. The creators in question are dead. Thomas Paine covers this in his pamhlet _Rights of Man_.

How can a corpse deploy wealth? If they wanted to do something with that wealth, which I agree they have the right to do, wouldn't it make sense to do it while they still have the ability to have thoughts?

It makes more sense to me for the government to get it, because that reduces the need for them to take wealth from people who are alive and might be able to use their wealth.

> "Arguing that spoiled kids have not earned it is a lot easier than arguing that the government is deserving."

Isn't "the government is deserving" the crux of the Gates/Buffett argument? That government has provided them, as wealthy people, far greater services than the average person? (In the form of providing safety, protecting property, supplying an educated workforce, enforcing market rules, etc)

The general idea being that you simply can't become fabulously wealthy via anything short of barbarism without government, so the government does deserve something more to further these services that they're providing?

If Gates/Buffett really believe that the government is deserving, why have they arranged their affairs to pay as little tax as possible? Including (but not limited to) essentially zero estate tax?

Forgive me if I'm not convinced by an argument that suggests that others should be compelled to do something the proponents of the argument relentlessly avoid.

To be fair, I think their argument is more accurately phrased: the government is more deserving than the heirs (after a reasonable threshold, natch). Or, more generally, society is more deserving.

I don't see a logical conflict in their preference for private charity over government redistribution.

Honestly, I don't think any proponent of the estate tax would mind if the practical result of a high estate tax was that the rich just gifted their estates to private charity to spite the government. Government is just the only group with a sufficient cudgel to enforce the practice and sufficient reach to ensure that otherwise-undirected estates do give back to society.

[citation needed]

I see that both gave huge portions of their estates to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This in no way violates the principle of their position.

So the government should get it (in the form of taxes)?

Sure. Until we have a better organization, whose primary concern is the overall health of society, to distribute it.

Government is certainly a flawed organization. But we currently trust them with all our other tax dollars. I don't see any reason to hold estate tax dollars to a different standard than any other government revenue.

But the argument being made here is that spoiled kids are not deserving, so the estate tax is a just tax.

The point is: government is not deserving either, so the spoiled kids angle is bogus.

Pointing out that the government collects other taxes is simply not relevant to this aspect of the conversation.

Except that deserving isn't a binary attribute. So pointing out the government is undeserving isn't sufficient.

My point is that we as a society have entrusted government specifically with the job of redistributing wealth to better society and that makes them the better of bad choices.

The government isn't taxing the estate itself, it's taxing the transfer. See gift tax as well.

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